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An unusual botnet dubbed Mylobot has emerged, percolating up from the Dark Web – and displaying a never-before-seen level of complexity in terms of the sheer breadth of its various tools, especially evasion techniques.

According to an analysis posted on Tuesday by Tom Nipravsky, a security researcher for Deep Instinct, Mylobot’s bag of tricks is bursting at the seams. These include anti-VM, anti-sandbox and anti-debugging techniques; wrapping internal parts with an encrypted resource file; code injection; process hollowing (where an attacker creates a new process in a suspended state, and replaces its image with the one that is to be hidden); reflective EXE, which involves executing EXE files directly from memory, without having them on disk; and, it also has a delaying mechanism of 14 days before accessing its C&C servers.

“The structure of the code itself is very complex – it’s a multi-threaded malware where each thread is in charge on implementing different capability of the malware,” Nipravsky told Threatpost in an email interview. “The malware contains three layers of files, nested on each other, where each layer is in charge on executing the next one. The last layer is using [the Reflective EXE] technique.”

“The fact that everything takes place in memory (while executing the main business logic of the botnet in an external process using code injection) makes it even harder to detect and trace,” Nipravsky said.

In terms of function, Mylobot can be used to download whatever payload its bot herders choose, whether that’s cryptomining, ransomware, banking trojans, spyware or others. It could also be used for DDoS attacks. In the examined campaign, it was downloading the DorkBot backdoor. The current delivery method of the malware is unknown.

“An important thing to mention – the C&C is not hosting DorkBot binary, but rather commands the malware to download DorkBot from another server,” the researcher explained to us.

“The main functionality of the botnet enables an attacker to take complete control of the user’s system – it behaves as a gate to download additional payloads from the command-and-control servers,” Nipravsky said.

Interestingly, Mylobot also hunts for other malware on target machines, and disables anything it comes across.

“One of the main capabilities is related to malware vs. malware wars,” Nipravsky told Threatpost. “The code is designed to intentionally terminate and delete any process running from the Application Data folder, where most of the malware lives. It also searches for specific folders of other botnets.”

This is likely an indicator of the mounting competition among cybercriminals for territory. The Dark Web has lowered the barrier of entry when it comes to the skills needed to get into the game, meaning that there are more and more players scrambling for a piece of the action.

“The Dark Web plays a critical part in the spread of malware: It’s rather simple accessibility of services and knowledge has made it easy for any attacker to gain much more abilities in minimum effort,” explained Nipravsky. “By using the Dark Web, anyone today can access an online market and purchase a malware. An attacker can purchase access to exploit kits, buy traffic of tens of thousands of users to a web page, or even buy a full ransomware-as-a-service for his own use.”

The botnet (named after a Deep Instinct head researcher’s dog) is one to watch, warned Nipravsky.

“We expect this rare and unique behavior is because of money purposes within the Dark Web,” he told Threatpost. “The author of this botnet knows what they’re doing and it is not an amateur operation. No indication yet of who the author is.”

However, he said that after examining the C&C server, it turns out that it has been used by other malware campaigns, all of which emanate from the Dark Web – so the threat actors behind Mylobot are likely involved in a range of activities.

“According to our research, the IP of the C&C server was first seen on November 2015, and is linked to DorkBot, Locky and Redyms/Ramdo (click-fraud malware),” he noted. “When it comes to resources ,we see that the botnet is trying to connect to 1404 different domains (in the time of writing this research, only one was alive). This is an indication for big resources in order to register all those domains.”